The following can happen if you use social media, particularly Twitter and Instagram: It’s easy to latch onto a trend or begin clicking on people to follow who focus on some obscure piece of information. In particular, since photos catch your eye, and both these platforms capture pictures, you can find yourself scrolling through photo after photo to the point of saturation.
Our world is becoming increasingly visual and less word-oriented. It would be hard to argue against that statement. Any newspaper editor would agree with it; in fact almost anyone who works in the field of written communications would agree. We read less and less. We look at more “things,” with “things” being photos, videos, charts, graphs, and short quotes or statements.
In focusing on shorter phrases and visual imagery, we also then have the ability to look at more. We scan, we summarize, we shorten. Then we do it again.
By continuing to visit certain sites or follow specific people, issues, companies, celebrities, causes or leaders, we open ourselves to the continuity of those specific sites. If you’re on Twitter, for example, if you follow someone, you go to their feed and tap away, looking at what that person has to say in sound bites or coded notes to friends and fans.
What you don’t get is lengthy analysis. Instead, you often get repetition. If you seek this out, then you keep going back to their feed. If not, there are thousands of other places you can electronically visit.
Over the past four years, in developing a slight affinity for social media, I’ve found myself attracted to certain sites, causes and individuals. Most are funny or provide spectacular photographic imagery.
What I never expected though was to become addicted to elephants. Let me explain.
Elephants are intelligent, elegant, regal and fascinating. Think about how big they are. Then there is the thickness of their skin and how that has developed over the years. Their ears are monuments to the piece of the anatomy.
And then we get to the nose – the incredibly elongated nostrils and their ability to work like vacuum cleaners. If you’ve fed elephants peanuts at a zoo, circus or if you are lucky, on some form of trip into the wild, you know the weird sensation when they suck it off the palm of your hand. It is almost like they are tasting you at the moment, savoring who you are.
But it’s not those live incidents that have created my elephant addiction. Instead, it’s seeing pictures of them on Twitter or Instagram in their infancy, the goofy things they do, how they hang out in packs, the way the adults protect them, their demonstrated intelligence. There is also the extremely sad issue of elephant hunting, which gets trumpeted on Twitter, that further grabs my attention.
As the number of elephants dwindles around the globe, we are all diminished. This is where the ability of social media platforms to magnify messages becomes so valuable and visible. As elephant hunting and outright slaughter occurs, there are multiple concerned individuals sharing photos of the carnage and pushing the cause of protection and conservation of habitat.
So many animals have been put on this planet with us to be part of the ecosystem. If we lose elephants, we lose the ability to learn from them to create something larger for ourselves based on having creatures that are different but show us ways to live within limits.
We should watch and listen to the elephants. Observe their behavior and learn from them.
If we did that instead of shooting them, the world would be a better place.
Our world is becoming increasingly visual and less word-oriented. It would be hard to argue against that statement. Any newspaper editor would agree with it; in fact almost anyone who works in the field of written communications would agree. We read less and less. We look at more “things,” with “things” being photos, videos, charts, graphs, and short quotes or statements.
In focusing on shorter phrases and visual imagery, we also then have the ability to look at more. We scan, we summarize, we shorten. Then we do it again.
By continuing to visit certain sites or follow specific people, issues, companies, celebrities, causes or leaders, we open ourselves to the continuity of those specific sites. If you’re on Twitter, for example, if you follow someone, you go to their feed and tap away, looking at what that person has to say in sound bites or coded notes to friends and fans.
What you don’t get is lengthy analysis. Instead, you often get repetition. If you seek this out, then you keep going back to their feed. If not, there are thousands of other places you can electronically visit.
Over the past four years, in developing a slight affinity for social media, I’ve found myself attracted to certain sites, causes and individuals. Most are funny or provide spectacular photographic imagery.
What I never expected though was to become addicted to elephants. Let me explain.
Elephants are intelligent, elegant, regal and fascinating. Think about how big they are. Then there is the thickness of their skin and how that has developed over the years. Their ears are monuments to the piece of the anatomy.
And then we get to the nose – the incredibly elongated nostrils and their ability to work like vacuum cleaners. If you’ve fed elephants peanuts at a zoo, circus or if you are lucky, on some form of trip into the wild, you know the weird sensation when they suck it off the palm of your hand. It is almost like they are tasting you at the moment, savoring who you are.
But it’s not those live incidents that have created my elephant addiction. Instead, it’s seeing pictures of them on Twitter or Instagram in their infancy, the goofy things they do, how they hang out in packs, the way the adults protect them, their demonstrated intelligence. There is also the extremely sad issue of elephant hunting, which gets trumpeted on Twitter, that further grabs my attention.
As the number of elephants dwindles around the globe, we are all diminished. This is where the ability of social media platforms to magnify messages becomes so valuable and visible. As elephant hunting and outright slaughter occurs, there are multiple concerned individuals sharing photos of the carnage and pushing the cause of protection and conservation of habitat.
So many animals have been put on this planet with us to be part of the ecosystem. If we lose elephants, we lose the ability to learn from them to create something larger for ourselves based on having creatures that are different but show us ways to live within limits.
We should watch and listen to the elephants. Observe their behavior and learn from them.
If we did that instead of shooting them, the world would be a better place.